“...A passage from George Mackay Brown's Northern Lights, in which marine life overpowers a fishing vessel and revels in the death of one of the fishermen, inspired this 'tone poem' in which the timbral range of a large ensemble is deployed to the full. The convulsive opening gestures for piano and suspended cymbals, the alternating soliloquies for bass clarinet and bass oboe, and the stoical writing for strings and tom-tom before the subdued close all were drawn into a 14-minute structure with a convincing overall trajectory.
Richard Whitehouse, 2001